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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27339631">the place and the pit and the fear</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stacicity/pseuds/Stacicity'>Stacicity</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Magnus Archives (Podcast)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>M/M, a Halloween game of cat and mouse, gratuitous poetry quotation, more Buried themes and soil imagery than you could shake a stick at</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-11-02</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-11-02</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-07 00:20:37</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>6,963</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27339631</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stacicity/pseuds/Stacicity</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Gertrude shepherds Jurgen Leitner under the Institute for his own safety. He uses <em>The Seven Lamps of Architecture</em> to move and craft the tunnels under Millbank, awakening something in the process. Elias acts fast to avoid a fallout. Peter's just along for the ride. And something is moving in the walls.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Elias Bouchard/Peter Lukas, Jonathan Fanshawe/Jonah Magnus</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>52</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>the place and the pit and the fear</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This is the most absurdly self-indulgent thing ever but it's Halloween (belatedly) and I wanted to get a little spooky so have this! All of the quotations are from Tennyson's <em>Maud</em>. Potential triggers within are claustrophobia, dirt, worms and rats, all those other good Buried-core things.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> <em>    Dead, long dead,</em></p><p>
  <em>     Long dead!</em>
</p><p>
  <em>     And my heart is a handful of dust,</em>
</p><p>
  <em>     And the wheels go over my head,</em>
</p><p>
  <em>     And my bones are shaken with pain,</em>
</p><p>
  <em>     For into a shallow grave they are thrust,</em>
</p><p>
  <em>     Only a yard beneath the street,</em>
</p><p>
  <em>     And the hoofs of the horses beat, beat,</em>
</p><p>
  <em>     The hoofs of the horses beat,</em>
</p><p>
  <em>     Beat into my scalp and my brain</em>
</p><p> *   *   *   *</p><p>The foundations of what was once Millbank Prison lie on marshland. Under the wood and brick and stone of the building, a raft of cement floats over waterlogged soil, the building held aloft upon it like a passenger on a sailboat, floating over a narrow sea and sinking a little deeper each year. </p><p>The prisoners in Millbank had felt the damp as keenly as another inhabitant of their cells, clammy hands wrapping around their shoulders in the perpetual darkness, spongy and almost solid. More than one of them had dreamed of digging their fingers into that darkness, tugging it aside like tunnelling animals until they might emerge, blinking, into the light. No such luck. The tunnels were labyrinthine—so complex that even their ever-present, ever-watchful guards lost themselves within the belly of the prison from time to time—and the chill and the damp and the dark followed like dogs at their heels. </p><p>Since there was no solace in sight, they relied upon sound, carried clearly through the cells by the ventilation system that kept them from suffocating (drowning) on the darkness that shrouded their eyes and crept into their mouths and stomachs. The prisoners could speak from cell to cell, echoes bouncing their way through the corridors, and the footsteps of the guards (hurrying, faltering, uncertain, vicious) were easily audible. In the thickness of the dark each day, and each night, the voices of the prisoners rattled along the corridors like the skittering, tapping paws of the rats that ran between their cells, and over their feet while they slept. Each day, the bells of Westminster tolled, clearly audible to mark the crawling hours. And if a prisoner strained, they might hear the rattle of a carriage outside, the passers-by outside. They might hear one of their fellows set upon by a guard excising their fear in an act of violence, pain for its own sake. And all the time, even in the darkness, they were watched. </p><p>In the months before the prison was closed the damp had sought its way upwards, softening brick and coaxing mould between the flagstones, into the perimeter ditches. Fear had been sweated into the walls themselves, by the prisoners and the guards both, the shadow of a hundred terrified inhabitants blotted like ink against the cells. And it had sunk deeper, just a little deeper, into the swamp that parted to engulf it like overripe fruit, like a corpse splitting along its bloated seams. For all of Smirke’s ingenuity in the invention and construction of the raft, it would only take one shudder, one creak, to send them all below. </p><p>It was no small creak that did the job in the end. </p><p>There were close to a thousand people within the prison on the day that it fell. Prisoners, male and female, and guards, milling like ants in a nest through the corridors, calling out to one another, banging on the walls and clawing at the dark. A thousand people, and one man-shaped being on the fringes of his humanity (lingering at the threshold, knocking at the door) who walked to the centre, and one man who was not a guard, nor a prisoner, who followed him unseen with suspicion an ember at his chest and the dark warded from him by the keen-eyed determination of a predator that knows the hunt is on. </p><p>The Eye opened. The building fell. There was one being alive in the centre of what was once Millbank, and the swamp took hold of the rest, embracing them close within the shattered bones of the prison. 
</p><p> *   *   *   *
</p><p>There is plenty of life in the tunnels. Rats, worms, centipedes, the occasional mole snuffling around the bones and the crumbling walls held in the crushing grip of the dirt. The tunnels are motionless save for the shake of one set of feet disturbing decades of dust, slipping in once every few years with direct and unhesitating steps, slipping out.</p><p>So it stays until nearly a full century later. </p><p>There are two living beings in the tunnel other than the rats and the worms, both of them human, both of them having flirted with being otherwise. One is short and wiry, one taller and stooped, the both of them closely in step as they navigate the labyrinth to an inevitable dead end where what was once a cell wall has collapsed over the corridor, cutting it short. </p><p>The book is opened, dark eyes tracking over its page with a hesitancy borne of inexperience. </p><p>The walls move. </p><p>There are three living beings in the tunnels. </p><p> *   *   *   *
</p><p>
  <em> For I thought the dead had peace, but it is not so;</em>
</p><p>
  <em>     To have no peace in the grave, is that not sad?</em>
</p><p>
  <em>     But up and down and to and fro,</em>
</p><p>
  <em>     Ever about me the dead men go;</em>
</p><p>
  <em>     And then to hear a dead man chatter</em>
</p><p>
  <em>     Is enough to drive one mad.</em>
</p><p> *   *   *   *</p><p>
He opens his eyes, first. This is exceptional—he has not done this in some time—but futile, as the soil is packed close to his nose and his mouth, and there is nothing to see but the darkness where the dirt brushes his eyeballs, caught in his eyelashes and pressed to his teeth. He can smell the earth, the minerality of peat packed down beneath the dryness of cement, the chalky, limestoned edge of the soil that—he knows—runs its way along the banks of the Thames. He can feel the solid, lumpen shapes of bricks, rust-red from iron coaxed out in the heat of a kiln, pressed like nuggets of gold into the soil. And the soil itself, turned over and over by worm upon worm, digested and worked-through, potassium and phosphorus and calcium. </p><p>He can feel disturbances down here. Not just the footsteps that shudder through him like a hammer on an anvil, not just the awful wrenching of walls moving where the earth has held them still for decades, but more than that: the shudder of tunnels far beneath, wreathed in electric wire and carbon, huge tubes full of some sort of fast-moving transport, the howling of the air, the heat of a thousand bodies pressed-closed, pressed-in. So close to the earth. There is only the most fragile of boundaries separating them from the soil, and he can feel them—their heartbeats, their breaths—he can hear the way their eyes scrape against their skulls as they read and chatter and laugh with air stolen from above the surface. </p><p>He cannot see, no, but that’s of no consequence. He can feel enough, and his ribcage expands to encompass the foundations and all within, and he knows it all as surely as he once knew his very own hands and feet. </p><p>And he remembers—oh, only fragments, shards unearthed from the roiling silt in his head, to be brushed clean and examined more closely—he remembers—</p><p><em>“Lordamercy, Sam, there’s a lot of them today.” </em>And then a grunt, the shifting of leather boots on wet ground, the sound of something heavy being set to rest against the dirt.</p><p><em>“This isn’t the half of it. They were still clamoring to fill my barrow when I left, squeezing people in and twisting their arms and legs to make ‘em fit, wailing and crying that it’d be a curse to have ‘em still in the house. They’re piling them in the streets now and you can scarcely move for it. They’re saying it’s worse in France, worse in Italy, that scarcely a house is without an empty chair now.” </em>The second voice, breathless with exertion, released tightly from a body trying to speak whilst still holding its breath tightly, keeping its nose clear of the air. </p><p>
  <em>“Well, there’s safe harbor for them that found their way here, at least. C’mon, ‘fore the birds have at them. The least we can do is give them a good resting, and if there are more to come, we’ll have to bury them deep.” </em>
</p><p>The shifting and splashing of a load being set loose, tumbling and uneven, hands and feet splashing against murky puddles and lying still. The slicing rough sound of a sharp edge being set to the turf - two sharp edges - and twin grunting and heaving as the ground is turned over and over, consuming its quarry in uneven, ragged gulps, blackened skin and gaping mouths mixed in with rain-pulped clay. </p><p><em>“There!” </em>A good while later, triumphant despite the panting that accompanies it, “<em>as soft a bed as anyone could ask for.” </em></p><p>
  <em>“I still think we ought to be burning ‘em, Cecil.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Nonsense! Sending all that smoke up into the air, all those foul smells for the lungs of them that ain’t yet tainted? No, the ground’s the best place for them. What gentle release is there for a soul in a fire? It’ll come out screaming into the air all a-panicked and get lost. Better to put them somewhere deep and quiet where the soul can come out nice and gently with the spring buds and turn its little face skywards.” </em>
</p><p>
  <em>“There are so many of them-”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Not half so many as the earth can’t take them all and hold them safely, Sam. Stop your fussing and keep digging, now, keep digging—”</em>
</p><p>It’s a true memory, pressed as surely as a hand into the depths of his skull, each whorl and detail clear in his mind, but—it’s not his memory, he’s sure. Not the <em>he</em> that he used to be. Nonetheless he can feel where the bodies once lay, the rot and the blood giving way to the minerals they gifted to the earth, turned over and over until only the bones remain. </p><p>And more memories, unstoppered now from whatever deep recess has kept him silent and asleep for so long, undammed by the moving of the walls—</p><p>
  <em>“Oh, that’s mother’s ruin that is, you’ll not tempt me with that!”</em></p><p>
  <em></em>
</p><p>
  <em></em>
</p><p><em>“Look at it, it’s clear as water. How could this be any more foul than the ale or the wine you have no trouble pouring down your gullet four nights a week on Lupus Street?” </em>
</p><p>
  <em>“With you at my side, Benjamin, often as not, before this new fancy took a hold of you-”</em>
</p><p><em>“Now look here, just try a dram. You’ll find it as pleasant as anything. Look, see these?” </em>The clink of glass jars being moved, the scrape of a chair being shifted backwards-<em> “Juniper berries—and this is angelica root, and this is cassia-”</em></p><p>
  <em>“Aye, and it could be myrrh and frankincense, but my Molly will still have my hide for tanning if she thinks I’ve let you talk me into foolishness, Ben-”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Oh, have a care. Try a drop. Have I led you astray before?”</em>
</p><p>And then the tilt of a bottle, the gentle, percussive bubbling of liquid into glass, and the clinking, and the laughing. The rattle of dice and beneath it, the weight of a great copper distillery, water held aloft above the ground. And when the laughter turned to violence (the meaty thud of fists against flesh, the uneven stumbling of wounded, drunken men) there was the creaking pressure of the distillery being pushed over, crashing to the ground, soaking the floor in corrosive, cleansing alcohol. </p><p>And then, the flame. The water chased away, on the floor, below the floor, by searing and merciless heat, the distillery and everything in it going up in smoke while a set of footsteps hurried frantically away from the scene. </p><p>The distillery is long-gone, the site cleared for another building, but the bones are still there, scorched clean and still cracked along their edges by the heavy blows that killed the man they once belonged to. </p><p> *   *   *   *
</p><p>
  <em> Wretchedest age, since Time began,</em>
</p><p>
  <em>     They cannot even bury a man;</em>
</p><p>
  <em>     And tho' we paid our tithes in the days that are gone,</em>
</p><p>
  <em>     Not a bell was rung, not a prayer was read;</em>
</p><p>
  <em>     It is that which makes us loud in the world of the dead;</em>
</p><p> *   *   *   *</p><p>To the man in the dirt it feels almost like muscle memory. There’s a sense, there, an awareness of the feet that have pressed this soil down. The water that has returned to it, the blood and the urine and the sweat, salt-tears shed to feed mosses and grass on the surface and deeper, deeper beyond that, the inexorable sinking of the packed and untouched ground. It is so still, down here. It is so still. </p><p>Until it isn’t. </p><p>The walls move again. And he is shifted against his will from where an architect once lay his foundations securely, twisted unnaturally and pressed groaning, weeping, into the light; with a wrench, he is birthed painfully from the wall into the dim light of a tunnel, his knees cracking hard against the floors. </p><p><em>His</em> knees. He hasn’t thought of himself as having much of a human body for quite some time, but the evidence of it is in front of his weak and vulnerable eyes—fingernails grime-covered right to the quick, skin pruned with age and papery. He remembers these hands of his. Clever hands, as secure with a rifle when times demanded as they were with a pen or a needle and thread. </p><p>There are footsteps coming along the corridor. He scrambles to his feet, exercising limbs long-since atrophied in a motion that should be impossible and pressing himself back to the walls of the tunnel in a movement that he knows, before he has even quite processed the thought, will have the walls parting back to receive him. </p><p>It is safer, here, in the wall. He can feel the footsteps approaching, he is shaken by the echo of their impact. Two sets, one lighter than the other. And, as they get closer, he <em>hears</em> the footsteps, and the voices that come with them, narrowing his eyes—blinded, once again, by the covering of soil—and listening. </p><p>“-seems to have a certain efficacy, though obviously I can’t speak to its long-term effects.” It’s a man’s voice, deep and resonant, full of weariness and excitement. </p><p>“As long as you don’t try to mess around with any of the other entrances, I should think you’ll be alright. Certainly safer here than you would be above ground.” A woman’s voice, tight with impatience—she’s shorter than the man, taking two steps for every one of his but still striding ahead of him.</p><p>“Well, that’s true. And you’re sure that Elias can’t see down here?” </p><p>“He certainly hasn’t moved to keep me from taking statements down below. Whenever I spend any significant time down here he inevitably finds his way to my office to ask me those irritating little half-questions of his. Whether he knows what I’m doing, I can’t be sure—there’s always the possibility that he knows, and just hasn’t yet seen fit to <em>do</em> anything about it—but I’m reasonably confident that his sight down here is, at the least, shaky. Warped, maybe.”</p><p>“I hope you’re right. The last thing we need is him catching me down here.”</p><p>“Then don’t let him catch you, Jurgen. It seems simple enough to me.” </p><p>“Everything seems simple to you.” </p><p>“Is that what you think?” </p><p>“Am I wrong?” </p><p>Silence. The footsteps pause just by where he is sheltered within the wall, and he cringes back instinctively from the book that one of them is holding, chest constricting, lungs filling with soil as he tries to suck in a breath and finds himself nearly-incapable, his lungs and his ribs too solid to move all that much lest they crack like over-fired clay. </p><p>“Gertrude?” the man’s voice again, this time hesitant. </p><p>“Mm? Sorry. I thought I—” another pause, “never mind. Come along. I know you have some supplies but that won’t keep you alive for more than a few weeks, so we might as well establish some common pathways before you starve to death down here.” </p><p>The footsteps move on. He waits within the wall for what feels like an interminable length of time before he slips free again. This time it’s easier, the dirt parting obligingly like curtains to let him blink soil from his eyes and run his fingers through thinning, loam-clumped hair. He finds himself wishing for a looking-glass, of all things, something by which he could see himself, something which—</p><p>“<em>Honestly, will you ever stop preening yourself? I’ve been ready to leave for nearly half an hour, now.”</em></p><p>
  <em>“There’s no shame in looking one’s best, is there? I have a reputation to uphold. We can’t all run around covered in blood and ink-stains.” </em>
</p><p>
  <em>“No; as I understand it your reputation relies on you being covered in rather more esoteric substances-”</em>
</p><p><em>“Oh, hush. How do I look?” </em>A pause. A sigh. </p><p>
  <em>“Perfect. You always do.”</em>
</p><p>“<em>Well, then</em>,<em>” </em>the warm purr of a man well-satisfied, and this time the memory of touch, a hand slipping into the crook of his elbow, <em>“let’s be off</em>.” </p><p>He stumbles, hit by the force of the memory as if it’s a physical blow, torn between the remnants of what he once was (a living, breathing man of the surface, he’s sure of it) and the stalwart presence of the stone walls around him, whispering that what he <em>is</em> is all that matters, that he is part and parcel of the bones and the foundations around him, that barely a hundred feet lower lies soft and yielding marshland, that he need only close his eyes and sink, and be covered, and think on it no more. </p><p>Instead, he steadies himself with a hand upon the wall, and he walks. </p><p> *   *   *   *
</p><p><em>See, there is one of us sobbing,
No limit to his distress</em>;</p><p>Bones, bones in the walls and the floors, old and older, and he can feel the fear still permeated and stained into the very air, coating him like an oily film as he ambles through the warren of tunnels. The walking gets easier the more that he does it, limbs moving to root him, upheave him, root him again, the rhythmic, repetitive swing of a shovel into the ground. </p><p>Bones that he knows, somewhere, for he can feel them, the thick scent of fear still surrounding them even after what feels like a century. The chill of something he doesn’t recognise, and the half-remembered smell of a woody cologne, the clasp of warm hands and the twist of a gap-toothed smile. </p><p>
  <em>And another, a lord of all things, praying
to his own great self, as I guess;</em>
</p><p>Further above the tunnels he can feel square rooms and solid floors, a layout that he has no interest in exploring. But he can feel the vague shape of the things within it, their familiarity jarring. The ground has little love for man-made trinkets—there’s a carriage clock, there are letters locked within a drawer, there are sketches and drawings and photographs—but he knows them, he remembers them, and he remembers flashes of the man that once possessed them, his quiet refusal to be rid of anything that is useful. The clock ticks, and ticks, and the sound shakes through him like a heartbeat. </p><p>
  <em>And yonder a vile physician, blabbing</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The case of his patient— all for what?
To tickle the maggot born in an empty head,</em>
</p><p>
  <em>And wheedle a world that loves him not.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>For it is but a world of the dead.</em>
</p><p>Why was he here, before he was what he is? What dragged him to this place with all of its fear and darkness, what held him within its walls? What kept him alive, such as he might be alive (and something in his head whispers that he cannot be, for he has no breath and no heartbeat, and the tips of his fingers are blackened like corpseflesh) </p><p>He remembers the pull of the chase, magnetic and irresistible, to the man that he was hunting. He had long since lost his scent or the precise memory of his face, dampened by years of absence, but the fury was as raw and as overwhelming as it had been on the day that he’d sent off a letter, sealed and signed, to cut the man from him like a gangrenous limb. </p><p>He had done that, once. Cut limbs, sawed bone. He remembers. </p><p>And he remembers slipping through the walls of this place using guiles and deception unbefitting of a man at his age, shuffling through the hallways and listening to the sound of prisoners, the yelping and scrabbling of rabbits confined and entombed in a collapsed warren. </p><p>At the centre, his quarry. And then, a thunderous crack, and the shifting of the earth like the first pangs of birth, and the wailing and moaning of a thousand men and women dragged to the surface and pinned like butterflies to be examined, flayed-open and left raw and stinging in the rain, before the earth pulled all of them down, down, down to the depths. </p><p>The silence of mouths packed-tight with loam, clay to the roof of the mouth, to the back of the throat, lips moving and gulping like the mouths of fishes, eyes rolling backwards. And the million mouths of the worms that descended to pick through the old foundations and turn the earth over and over. </p><p>And with that memory entrenched in his mind, and the understanding of the tunnels on which he stands, he reaches out to feel for that man at the centre, the little hollow at the heart of what was once a beehive of cells. </p><p>He feels a chair, four legs weighted and pressing on the ground. He finds a body, the soles of its feet pressed to the soil through the remnants of leather shoes rotting and flaking away. He knows, now, where he is going. </p><p> *   *   *   *
</p><p>
  <em>Prophet, curse me the blabbing lip,</em>
</p><p>
  <em>     And curse me the British vermin, the rat;</em>
</p><p>
  <em>     I know not whether he came in the Hanover ship,</em>
</p><p>
  <em>     But I know that he lies and listens mute</em>
</p><p>
  <em>     In an ancient mansion's crannies and holes:</em>
</p><p>
  <em>     Arsenic, arsenic, sure, would do it.</em>
</p><p> *   *   *   *</p><p>It is not so simple as all that to navigate the tunnels, even when he knows which way he is going, even when the magnetism of his quarry and the lodestone of the watching, that searing sight, draws him like a compass in the right direction. The walls are not right. They are not as they were built, not as they fell, and he finds himself having to step through walls and tunnel in the soil like the moles and the centipedes around him to get the correct bearing. </p><p>Their hundreds of feet, endlessly marching, beat a tip-tapped tattoo on the crown of his newly airkissed scalp. </p><p>The next set of footsteps that come his way are larger than those of the rats and he retreats back into a wall to watch, expecting the man and the woman to pass his way again. </p><p>There is a man. Two men, walking side by side, one slim and slight, one taller and broader. He can only feel one set of footsteps. The other set barely disturbs the topmost layer of soil, creating an impression but with very little real weight behind it. It is not right. It is not as it should be, and he hates it. </p><p>“You know,” the voice is rumbling and packed with superficial cheer, “I can’t help but think you’re working quite quickly through your little store of favours.” </p><p>“Oh?” The reply is amused, just about, but simmering with banked impatience, tension thrumming straight like a piano-string tuned too tight, liable to snap at any moment. “Because of your little jaunt to Sannikovland?” </p><p>“That, yes. And her interference in my Ritual. And my attendance at your gala.” </p><p>“Don’t be petulant. This is important.” </p><p>“Isn’t it always?” </p><p>“Yes. But this one especially so.” </p><p>A silence. The footsteps pause and there’s the sound of something being sparked, the smell of smoke and a long inhale. </p><p>“Well, you’ll need to give me more explanation if I’m going to help. I don’t even know what we’re looking for down here. I didn’t even know there <em>were</em> tunnels down here.” </p><p>“Of course you didn’t. But that’s alright. I know exactly what I’m looking for.”</p><p>There’s a long sigh. He can feel a body settling back against the tunnel wall, can imagine the two of them there, watching one another. If he could see their faces—but what does that matter? They are intruders here, in the tunnels, in the corpse of the prison. He thinks that if he pushed hard enough, he could bring the walls down upon their heads, bury them with him where it’s warm and safe and still. </p><p>“The Buried,” the second man says, his words metered out slowly. It doesn’t sound hesitant, but just as if he’s judging his words carefully, depositing each one like a coin in a slot, each word counted lest he expend too many at once. “It seems to have brought something up. I’m sure I don’t need to explain to you why having the creature of another Entity running around here is a bad idea.” </p><p>“Well, maybe you do,” comes the jovial reply, the vowels stretched as if delivered through a bright and insincere grin. “After all, <em>I’m</em> down here with you.” </p><p>“Oh, Peter,” soft, velvety, exaggeratedly fond, “don’t be absurd. You’re down here with <em>me</em>.” </p><p>Another pause. He can all but hear the chess pieces sliding across the board between these two, the weighted interactions he remembers from others back in what he thinks must have been his own past—</p><p>“<em>I think you’ve had enough of my money for one year, Magnus.”</em></p><p>
  <em>“Do you?” </em>
</p><p>
  <em>“I do. If you continue to bleed your benefactors dry you’ll have none left.” </em>
</p><p>
  <em>“You needn’t remind me of that. Are you quite expended?”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Hardly.” </em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Ah. So it’s incentive you want. Rather clumsy, don’t you think?” </em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Why pay for what I could have for free?” </em>
</p><p>
  <em>“I might ask the same of you. You owe me.” </em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Do I?” </em>
</p><p>
  <em>“You do.” </em>
</p><p>Always that urge to intervene between two predators, to set a barrier between them for fear of further bloodshed. He remembers a time where he used to avoid bloodshed. Now, he waits to see if these two will tear one another apart. </p><p>“So you need me for muscle, hm? And why is it you can’t just point me in the right direction?”</p><p>“What do you think I’m doing?” </p><p>“Walking us round in circles, it feels like.” </p><p>“You should know better than that.” </p><p>“Should I? I’m starting to think, James-”</p><p>“Elias-”</p><p>“<em>Elias</em>—that you can’t find your way down here anymore than I can—”</p><p>“Careful—”</p><p>“Wouldn’t it be funny if you were as blind as a mole down here, of all places?” </p><p>There’s a sharply drawn breath, a shifting of weight, and he wonders, perhaps, whether these two really will come to blows. More than that, he is thinking about the second man and his arch, cold voice, remembering that lilt in a softer, crueller mouth. It makes no sense. It makes all the sense in the world. </p><p>After all, what does it matter the logic, the whys and wherefores of his suspicion? He can feel the body in the central chamber, and he <em>knows</em>. </p><p>Mind made up, he braces his palms flat against the soil at his sides and feels for the grasping roots of the concrete raft, intending to buckle it, to bend it and send all of them into the depths. Before he can quite get his grip the walls buckle again and he groans silently, lungs packed with loam, as he is twisted and cracked and knotted while the earth remakes itself, and him with it. </p><p> *   *   *   *</p><p>
  <em>But what will the old man say?</em>
</p><p>
  <em>     He laid a cruel snare in a pit</em>
</p><p>
  <em>     To catch a friend of mine one stormy day;</em>
</p><p>
  <em>     Yet now I could even weep to think of it;</em>
</p><p>
  <em>     For what will the old man say</em>
</p><p>
  <em>     When he comes to the second corpse in the pit?</em>
</p><p> *   *   *   *</p><p>Elias, he called him. James, too. How many names has his old foe had, how many bodies has he puppeted around the dirt? He doesn’t know the how, or the why, and nor does he care. Elias, James, <em>Jonah</em>—he is encroaching upon territory that is not his. </p><p>Amongst his many vices when he was alive (before the soil and the clay) possessiveness was always one. Far too much so for his own good. He has always wanted to wrap twine around the wrists and the hands of those he loves for fear that they will hurt themselves in their own poor confusion. He has seen too many clever men maimed and blinded and made dumb by accidents or idiocy. He has seen too many bodies mangled by misfortune. It would be simpler to keep them all in glass jars and know them to be safer. </p><p>He had a glass jar in a locked cabinet for a while, with eyes floating within it, long-since plucked from the cavity of one such unhappy body. The fury seems oddly muted, now, but as inevitable as thunder after the lightning-fast flame of the initial reaction, the letter written swiftly and sent away with a tense jaw. Poor, miserable Albrecht had been so afraid at the last. Robert’s last letters to him had been written with a shaking hand and an unsteady mind. And the first one, the sweetest, most raw loss, the most painful of them all—</p><p>The ground settles, and with it his resolve, and he finds that set of footsteps again, dogging them further into the maze as they wind towards the centre like comets caught in an orbit. </p><p>There are stops and starts. At once point, the four people within the tunnels almost cross paths, both Elias and the woman—Gertrude—stopping still like wolves caught at the boundaries of their territories, pausing to see if the other might make themself known, eventually turning away with murmured excuses on both sides to find another path. Jurgen and Peter seem none the wiser, and he waits to let the quiet settle. In the silence that follows there is another awful, electric pulse at his very core, and the sound of a door creaking open. While he writhes in silent, hideous agony, he hears a laugh like ice on a sensitive tooth, and the door creaks closed again. </p><p> *   *   *   *</p><p>“So this thing of the Buried-”</p><p>“Mm?” </p><p>It must have been hours, now, they have been journeying. He could have brought the walls down upon them several times, now, but it feels important that they reach the centre. Never mind the puppet bodies, never mind the distractions; the prey is at the heart of this, and that is where he will go. While he pushes hard through the earth to part it for him, he listens to them talk. </p><p>“What brought it up from down below?” </p><p>“How should I know? I’m sure the Buried has its roots in all sorts of places.” </p><p>“<em>How should I know</em>—” high-pitched and mocking. “Are you saying you <em>don’t</em>?” </p><p>“I’m saying it’s irrelevant <em>where</em> it came from, or <em>why</em>. The salient fact is that I can’t have it down here.” </p><p>“And you don’t know a thing about it?” </p><p>There’s another sigh, long and aggrieved. “I really don’t see why you’re being difficult about this.” </p><p>“Don’t you?” </p><p>“I don’t.” Another silence, and then an aggrieved huff. “<em>Very well</em>. When the Watcher’s Crown was first attempted-”</p><p>“Oh, this isn’t going to be one of your <em>histories</em> is it?”</p><p>“<em>Peter</em>.” </p><p>“Alright! Alright-” accompanied by a half-laughed yelp, “<em>ow</em>, you vicious little bastard—that was entirely unnecessary! Go on, then, don’t let me stop you.” </p><p>“The Crown was a ritual of the Eye, but it brought the whole place down. All of that fear seeping loose into the ground. I wouldn’t be surprised if something spawned from that, and it’s been awakened now by some means.” </p><p>This time, the silence is more tense. </p><p>“Something?” </p><p>“Yes.” </p><p>“Someone?” </p><p>“Maybe.” </p><p>“Someone you know?” </p><p>“Unlikely.” </p><p>“Do you think that your Archivist has brought it up?” </p><p>“No.” Another pause, another sigh. “Maybe. If so, I’m not sure even she knows what she’s up to. All the more reason to nip it in the bud.” </p><p>“Mm. Quite a dangerous job, this.” </p><p>“Aren’t you up to the task?”</p><p>“Oh, <em>I</em> don’t mind. I’m just worrying about your fragile constitution. Anything could jump out of the shadows and break you.” </p><p>“I’m sure.” There’s a rustle of fabric, a soft chuckle in the darkness. “Anything at all.” </p><p>There’s a corner at the end of this passage. They take one way. He goes to take the other but finds the wall once again <em>not where it should be</em>, momentarily in the light, his face in the open air where his body is still concealed, his eyes squinting into the face of—
</p><p>“Mordechai?” it comes out as if ripped from his lungs before he can stop it, torn from him as surely and instinctively as the look of horror on the bearded face in front of him, the almost <em>hiss</em> that comes from further down the corridors as Elias turns thundering around—</p><p>He retreats. </p><p> *   *   *   *</p><p>
  <em>     Not that gray old wolf, for he came not back</em>
</p><p>
  <em>     From the wilderness, full of wolves, where he used to lie;</em>
</p><p>
  <em>     He has gather'd the bones for his o'ergrown whelp to crack;</em>
</p><p><em>     Crack them now for yourself, and howl, and die</em>.</p><p> *   *   *   *</p><p>It’s only a tactical retreat, he knows, since they are going the same way, but now he must hurry there first. Mordechai’s face on a body that is not his, in new clothes, with a strange new beard and longer hair and a different cast to the face—he can scarcely unpiece his memories from the thoughts of the pit, the fear of young Sam and Benjamin’s violence and all of it, all of it, boiling and pressing on the inside of his skull. </p><p>It should be quieter down here, but he can hear the creak and snap of bones being shifted around him, the whispered prayers pressed to prison walls long-since swallowed by the mud. So many bodies rotted and melted into the walls that make up his own foundations. So much weariness and fear driving him on where he ought to be sleeping in the belly of the ground, ought to be soothed and rocked on the warm and amniotic sea of the molten core below. </p><p>The central chamber is vast and empty, a pocket of open air with a shaft of dim and uneasy sunlight casting it in a queasy, perpetual dusk, grey as the body before him. The skin sags over the skull—high cheekbones and the remains of what might once have been cherubic lips—and the eye-sockets look like wells bored deep, deep into the ground, black and impenetrable within. </p><p>Is this what he became? And why, to what end? What gave him such boldness, such irreverent, vicious ambition? What did he—does he—hope to gain? </p><p>He remembers loving this face, once, counting freckles where now there are age-spots and dark circles. He remembers—</p><p>“<em>No, don’t go—come to bed, come back to bed with me.”</em></p><p>
  <em>“Jonah, I have patients to attend to.” </em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Yes; and some of them will die, and some will live, but you have me warm and living here.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Don’t be callous.” </em>
</p><p><em>“Jonathan-” </em>spoken in that soft and wheedling tone he once knew so well, the firelight glowing off just-bruised shoulders, the shift of bedsheets to reveal soft curls and soft, entreatingly-glistening skin, <em>“Doctor Fanshawe, you have a patient here to attend.” </em></p><p><em>“Brute.” </em>He is a brute, and they both know it. He is vicious, perhaps even heartless, but his lips are warm and the swanlike curve of his neck irresistible as he tips his head back to accept more kisses. “<em>I ought to ban you from my surgery.” </em></p><p>
  <em>“Then I shall sneak in smuggled in Barnabas’ coat, or wrapped in a rug under Mordechai’s arm like Cleopatra.” </em>
</p><p><em>“I know you would.” </em>Persistent, incorrigible man. He remembers loving him like one might love a capricious and cruel deity, some young god with the power to reward and castigate, and the inconsistency to do both in one day. He loved him, helplessly, blindly. He traces soil-damp fingers over a wrinkled, withered cheek, sunken and bruised like an old apple, and wonders whether either of them could have avoided this strange fate of theirs. At least in the ground, together, the world may be better off for their sleeping, and—</p><p>He hears the footsteps, but he doesn’t feel them. There’s only the cold smell of mist before something flat and heavy hits him across the back of the skull and he crumples to the ground, digging his fingers in against the stone and willing it to part for him, to swallow him entirely while he is yet living. </p><p>It does not. Perhaps he is too dazed to call upon it properly. Perhaps it has felt his tacit rejection, and resents him for it. Either way he is stranded like a fish within the open air, gasping and whimpering as a hand fists itself in his hair and tugs his face up to meet Elias’. </p><p>The face is unfamiliar. Young-ish, perhaps late thirties, blonde hair carefully combed. The hand held to his cheek has manicured nails where Jonah had always bitten his right down to the quick. But he’d know those eyes anywhere. </p><p>“Well?” Peter asks impatiently from behind him. “Recognise him?” </p><p>Elias’ eyes search his face, and he stares right back, a fox in a trap, a butterfly pinned to a board, his mouth held fast by terror and clay. </p><p>“No.” Elias says finally, and steps back. “Go on.” </p><p>The blade falls. </p><p> *   *   *   *</p><p>“Seems a bit irreverent, really,” Peter remarks as they emerge from the tunnels, a sack slung over his shoulder. </p><p>“What do you mean?” </p><p>“Killing a creature of the Buried with a shovel.” </p><p>“Mm. Well, he isn’t dead yet, but that can’t be helped. And we can’t burn him here—that will only have Gertrude asking questions—so if the best we can do is incapacitate him for now, so be it.” Elias sighs, adjusting his cuffs and looking at Peter for a long, heated moment. Peter looks back, confused, before he feels the tickle behind his eyes that signifies Elias looking <em>through</em> him, and groans, squeezing his eyes shut, prevented from knuckling his fingers into his own eyes or Elias’ jaw by the sack in one hand, the spade in the other. </p><p>“<em>Stop</em> that, damn you, I’m not your mirror.” </p><p>“No.” Elias smiles but thinly, wearily. “You’ve been very helpful. Simon will be here shortly.” </p><p>Peter sucks his teeth thoughtfully, shifting the bag on his shoulder. </p><p>“What’ll you do with him?” </p><p>“Simon will take him somewhere that the Buried can’t get to him. Something lead-lined, maybe, or buried in the sand under the sea somewhere; somewhere he won’t do any harm.” </p><p>“Do any of your old acquaintances meet with good ends, Elias?” Peter’s tone is casual but his eyes are sharp, even as his boots start to go misty at their edges, even as his features grow blurred, melting into the surrounding air. Elias is tense, looking for a moment like he might deny having known the body in the bag—but then he sighs, lifts one shoulder in a half-shrug.</p><p>“Give it a few more years, and we’ll find out.” Elias’ hand falls against where Peter’s now isn’t, a not-touch that has Peter’s lips quirking before he fades away into the empty air, and Elias is left with the bag. </p><p>Simon does come, soon enough, falling into the courtyard and bouncing on the balls of his feet as he nods towards the bag. </p><p>“You called me in an <em>awful</em> hurry, Elias, what’s so urgent?” </p><p>Elias just nods to the bag until Simon opens it, peering inside and then recoiling with an eloquent grimace of distaste, catching his breath before he peers in again. </p><p>“Is that—well, blow me down. He came for you?” </p><p>“He did.” </p><p>“My, my. Tenacious little thing. Lucky you caught him when you did.” </p><p>“Quite. What will you do with him?” </p><p>“Oh, there’s a skyscraper being built in Taiwan. The foundation is lifted on stilts, sort of, to help prevent against earthquakes, and the bottom few floors are all glass and metal; I’ll slip him in a box in there now they’ve stopped the bulk of the construction. He’ll be a good way from the soil.”</p><p>“Good. Thank you.” </p><p>“Oh, my pleasure. Nice to see an old friend again. <em>Two</em> old friends, even.” </p><p>Not-quite-conscious and curled within the bag, the being within feels a rush of air, the odd displacement, the twitching of phantom limbs reaching back for him from the soil under Millbank. Hands grasping and reaching, towards which he longs to reach back and cling, to return to the bosom of the mossy, waterlogged soil. No such luck. He wails and rasps his woes within the glass prison in which he finds himself, sightless, motionless—as fragile and useless as the withered body in the central chamber of the prison. </p><p>
  <em>     O me, why have they not buried me deep enough?</em>
</p><p>
  <em>     Is it kind to have made me a grave so rough,</em>
</p><p>
  <em>     Me, that was never a quiet sleeper?</em>
</p><p>
  <em>     Maybe still I am but half-dead;</em>
</p><p>
  <em>     Then I cannot be wholly dumb;</em>
</p><p>
  <em>     I will cry to the steps above my head,</em>
</p><p>
  <em>     And somebody, surely, some kind heart will come</em>
</p><p>
  <em>     To bury me, bury me</em>
</p><p>
  <em>     Deeper, ever so little deeper.</em>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>rip Jonathan Fanshawe (again) I guess. </p><p>Kudos &amp; comments soothe my itching soul.</p><p> <a href="https://ajcrawly.tumblr.com">Find me on tumblr</a> and say hi!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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